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Monthly Archives: July 2011

It’s In Development time again, and this week the topic of choice is a card you may well have expected me to have written about already – Birthing Pod! What does it do? How does it impact the game? What’s the best Birthing Pod deck out there, and how can the Pod (appropriately) lead us down the path to subtle yet inexorable failure?
It’s all in there, along with some deck lists, 75% of which can end the game with one or another variety of infinite combo (including Jonathon Loucks’ craziness from the Seattle Open, which features two takes on arbitrarily large numbers).
So click here to read the article, then join the conversation. Which Pod is best?
Note that The Field Report is being deferred one week as I spent all my free time this week trying to break the commodity chemicals metagame instead of Standard.

It’s In Development time again, and this week it’s all about U/W Control.
In post-M12 Standard, U/W Control is a force to be reckoned with once again. This week, I’ve explained the highs and lows of U/W Control, as well as presenting my build for Sea Gate Control – my own peculiar U/W variation.
…and, as requested by Michael Perry over on twitter, here are some basic sideboarding notes for the deck:Versus Valakut
+2 Flashfreeze
+2 Negate
-3 Wall of Omens
-1 Day of JudgmentVersus U/W and U/B Control (generally include CawBlade variations as well)
+3 Azure Mage
+2 Negate
-3 Wall of Omens
-2 Day of JudgmentVersus Tempered Steel, Vampires, and other creature-based archetypes
+4 Timely Reinforcements
-3 Spell Pierce
-1 Jace, Memory AdeptVersus Splinter Twin
+2 Negate
+4 Dismember
-3 Wall of Omens
-3 Day of Judgment
This covers most of the major metagame territory. Feel free to ask in the comments if you’d like more elaboration on any of the matchups.

In Development time has come again, and this week the topic is the aggro-combo deck I’ve been monkeying with for the past week or two.
Yes, we are Trapping large things into play.Click here to read about my adventures in Summoning, including a discussion of those Trap odds and the true engine of the Trap deck (hint: not its namesake card).

In the recent re-debut of The Field Report, I linked to an article by Josh Silvestri on CFB as an example of a good fundamental analysis of the components of the metagame.
Josh and I have clearly been on the same wavelength, as he busted out an excellent article in his regular weekly column at GatheringMagic.com that takes another stab at discussing the sentimental component of metagame analysis.
In case you’re lost as to what sentimental analysis is, I go into it elsewhere, but the short version is “It’s what people think the metagame will do” (as contrasted with what the metagame has done already and evaluation of the parts that make up the metagame — the decks).
Josh is right on the money with this remark:“User perception can be factually incorrect but never invalid”